JOSEF ALBERS AUTONOMOUS COLOR
Ikko Tanaka [Design Advisor]
Fukishama, Japan: Center for Contemporary Graphic Art and Tyler Graphics Archive Collection, 1996. Parallel texts in Japanese and English. Original edition. Printed saddle stiched wrappers. 68 pp. Exhibition catalogue with essays, black and white text illustrations and color plates. Errata sheet laid in. Wrappers lightly worn, but a very good or better copy.
8.85 x 12-inch softcover catalogue with 68 pages of essays, black and white text illustrations and color plates issued in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name from July 16 – October 13, 1996 at the Center for Contemporary Graphic Art [CCGA]. Essays by Fujio Maeda, Nicholas Fox Weber, and Mitsuhiko Hoshi.
A professor at the Bauhaus before World War II, Josef Albers escaped the Nazis by emigrating to the United States where he taught at various institutions and propagated his theory about spatial perception based on color and geometric forms. His ideas greatly influenced postwar modern art, especially graphic design, and led to the creation of a school of geometric abstract painting. Albers was also enthusiastically engaged in printmaking, believing that artistic works could be created through technical means and without manual intervention by the artist. Albers autonomy of color, constructed through exhaustive precision, was refined through the printmaking process beyond that in his oil paintings. In his collaborative efforts with Kenneth Tyler, which started in 1963, Albers produced many of the famous works of contemporary printmaking.
This exhibit was held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the death of this great artist. The exhibit focused on Albers and his lifelong study of spatial expression. About 80 pieces were displayed, including four series of prints from the CCGA collection and prints created in the 1960s at Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Gemini G.E.L., and owned today by Kenneth Tyler.
Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was a German-born American artist and educator whose work formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the twentieth century.
Albers enrolled as a student in the Vorkurs of Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course ‘Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts.
In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. At this time, he married Anni Albers (née Fleischmann) who was a student there. His work in Dessau included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.
With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933 the artists dispersed, most leaving the country. Neither Josef Albers nor his wife Anni spoke a word of English when they left Germany for the United States in 1933 to teach at Black Mountain College, an art and design school that had opened a few months before on a shoestring budget in rural North Carolina. Founded by a radical educationalist John Rice, Black Mountain was committed to experimentation, cross-disciplinarity and the idea that everyone should pitch in, whether it was to teach a class, or fix the plumbing.
The Alberses were defining influences on the school, whose students and teachers included many of the most influential US artists, designers and artisans of the late 20th century, from Cy Twombly and Robert Motherwell, to Willem and Elaine de Kooning. Merce Cunningham formed his first dance company there, John Cage staged his first happening, and they began lifelong collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg. The Alberses persuaded friends to help out, either by teaching like Xanti Schawinsky and Lyonel Feininger, designing buildings like Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, or donating books to the library like Alfred Barr and Walker Evans.
Josef Albers taught at Black Mountain College for sixteen years. In 1950 he joined the faculty at Yale University as chairman of the Department of Design.
Ikko Tanaka (Tanaka Ikkō, 1930 – 2002) was a Japanese graphic designer. One of the most significant figures in postwar Japanese graphic design, Tanaka is widely recognized for his prolific body of interdisciplinary work, which includes graphic identity and visual matter for Muji, Seibu Department Stores, Mazda, Issey Miyake, Hanae Mori, Expo 85, and posters for Noh productions and other performances and exhibitions in Japan and beyond. He also was also active in realms of book and exhibition design. His use of bold, polychromatic geometries and harnessing of the dynamic visual potential of typography are undergirded by a sensitivity towards traditional Japanese aesthetics.